Return
by Alex Mcpherson
Summary: You can Never Go Home Again... or Can You? For one resident on the voyage of the damned, Earth wasn't home. Voyager was. And there was very little she wouldn't do to go back, to relive it all. So that's what she did... of a sort.


**Return**

 **Stardate 48295.5  
USS Endeavour, NCC-71805, Nebula Class**

Ensign Annika Naomi Janeway stepped out of the Captain's ready room, and calmly made her way to the port side turbolift, passing the First Officer whom gave her a smile and nod. "Sir." She greeted with a small smile, and left the bridge.

Entering the turbolift, she called out, "Deck 9." As the turbolift began to move, she couldn't help the nerves. She was supposed to be heading to Deep Space Nine, spend some vacation time visiting bajor, then board the USS Voyager for its maiden voyage as a relief operations officer, scheduled departure for 48309, or Friday, 23rd April, 2371 at 19:00 hrs. She much preferred using the earth system over stardates. Usually, the stardates were for just recording purposes, but many preferred their home planets' date and time system. For one thing, she had yet to find someone who didn't have to look it up when making note of the stardate for records, when four years at Starfleet Academy on earth time, plus however long before that for most during childhood hardwired pretty much 98% of starfleet personnel to earth time.

As she began to get her - already packed and mostly untouched - things ready to go, she started a personnel log.

"Personal Log, Ensign Annika Janeway. Stardate, 48295.6. Time, twenty-one fifty-six. It's late. I'm tired, and now I have to make the rest of the way - alone - aboard a runabout because the Endeavour is changing course, turning around. Heading for a disaster. Since the runabouts travel about half a light year - just over, per day at Warp 5, its maximum safe speed? That puts the 2.5 light years I'd have to travel at five days! If I don't miss Voyager's launch, then it's only because they either delayed it or I cut it close. We'll see, though... once I'm on the runabout, I'll know my eta.

"And to think... in 24 hours I would have already been on Deep Space Nine, and have four days of down time! Argh where's that... Right. End log."

She finished gathering everything together, and crossed fingers that she'd be allowed this... "Ensign Janeway to Transporter Room Three. I have some personal cargo to be transported directly to Runabout Yukon."

"Ensign, You are not authorised for that."

"Clear it with the Captain, I've got 4 days and 20 hours to get to _voyager_ , and the trip will take 4 days and, guess what, 20 hours... it'll take me an hour to haul it all by hand to the shuttlebay..."

"Standby."

She groaned as a minute passed, before the reply came. "Transporter Room Three to Ensign Janeway, prepare for transport."

* * *

The Nebula Class' had two shuttlebays, and carried a full compliment of work bees for external maintenance and repair, Type 6 shuttles for crew transfer within system, Type 7s for the same between systems at short range, and Type 9s for other purposes, including as a 'tug' for large cargo pods, hence why the aft end held a void between the sides. And then there were the Runabouts - faster, longer range, and multi-mission capable. At close range, well, you use the ship or shuttles. At longer ranges, if you can't take the ship there, that's what they were for. And the Endeavour had four of them onboard - three as part of its' compliment, and a fourth it was transferring to Deep Space Nine, only the ship had to divert.

They were only 2.5 light years from Bajor, when she spoke to the captain. At warp 8, the ship could cover that distance in 21 hours and 25 minutes. With turn around time, the ship would lose 1 day and 20 hours just to get to where they were currently. But the ship had turned around at the 1.9 ly mark, and was heading to a system 21 light years away, responding to a combined natural disaster and pirate attack. The Endeavour was equipped for the humanitarian role, but not combat. At present speed, they would arrive in seven days and 12 hours. And even though they were going in almost the complete opposite direction - Deep Space Nine was behind them now, but not directly, - because the ship was not as capable in the combat role, the Defiant was responding, and travelling at Warp 9.1, they'd beat the Endeavour by a day.

There were no big ships that could respond sooner than that, though the Captain of the Endeavour had informed her, after she asked, that a pair of Miranda class ships had been in system, and are barely holding back the pirates trying to take advantage of the natural disaster. Voyager wasn't going because, for starters, many of the crew weren't even on station - half of those who weren't aboard yet, were transferring in on civilian merchant vessels, the other half aboard other starfleet vessels and having, she presumed, to do the same as herself. She was just glad that the Endeavour had the runabout to spare, since it was destined to join the existing three for Deep Space Nine.

* * *

Her Awareness returned quickly, and she bolted for the cockpit of the runabout, ignoring the mess of falling bags. Silently, she hoped everything had been transported, though since she had in fact created a pile with beacons to lock onto, she doubted anything was left.

By the time the runabout was powered up and ready to launch, she knew she was going to be cutting it close.

"Runabout Yukon to Endeavour, in final preparations to launch." She reported.

"Yukon, this is Endeavour. Prepare for _rapid_ departure, we'll be dropping from warp only long enough for launch, so please clear the doors quickly."

"Understood."

She powered the anti-gravs, and the shuttle lifted off a metre of the deck, and keeping the craft steady, she manoeuvred it to the launch spot. Immediately, she noticed that the doors had already started to open - likely the moment she had contacted the Endeavour.

"Ready to perform Rapid launch on your mark."

Beyond the doors, the streaks of dust disappeared and the starfield returned to normal... and she immediately punched the engines to full impulse, and began to engage the warp drive.

The twin struts of the Endeavour's Scientific Mission pod disappeared from view either side as the runabout rocketted out of the shuttlebay. Rapid Launch Procedure, when someone had to leave a ship that was tasked for a humanitarian mission elsewhere, forcefields would be erected immediately behind the launching craft so the pilot could utilize impulse power, rather than thrusters-only, which were... slow.

By the time the warp drive created the warp field - which she had began to activate together with the impulse drives - the runabout had already travelled half a million miles relative to the Endeavour, while the Endeavour itself was re-engaging its warp engines.

All told, from the Endeavour cutting speed from Warp 8, to resuming that speed sans one runabout and one ensign, only ten seconds had passed.

From her point of view, it had taken fifteen - though on her side, that was because the Danube Class Runabout didn't accelerate from warp one to warp five nearly as quick as The Endeavour could from a stand-still to Warp 8.

Checking her position and speed, she sighed.

"Computer, Estimate Time of Arrival to Deep Space Nine, values in Earth Dating System please."

"Estimated Arrival date of 23rd of April, Time, Eighteen Forty-three."

Cutting it close. Very Close.

* * *

 **ETA: 2 Days, 11 Hours**

She smiled as she slowly swayed her body in the chair to the music, Padd in hand with Voyagers' manifest.

A quick call to Deep Space Nine had confirmed, the moment she was in range of Voyager, a pilot from the station would beam over to relieve her. On her call to Voyager, she'd only gotten to the first officer, who understood and so she and her things would be beamed directly to voyager - her 'luggage' to her quarters, herself to the Transporter Room.

They had already confirmed, she was the only one left they were waiting on arriving at the station - the other crew had made good time.

She... was excited to meet them again. Well. For the first time. She was nervous as hell too, and hoped they liked her; it would kill her if they didn't. And she wasn't looking forward to meeting all the people who would die when the Caretaker grabbed the ship, but Voyager needed to be in the Delta Quadrant. For around eight years, from her and her friends calculations. She missed Miral. Icheb. Seven.

Her excited mood dropped at that, and the nerves hit hard. The Fear. The loss. "Oh god... Seven."

The tears, for the first time in a long time, started to fall.

She barely made it to the small bathroom of the Runabout, shaking as she was, and stared hard into her reflection.

The small bumps on her forehead, marking her Ktarian heritage, and over her left eye, a borg implant. Tanshumanism wasn't popular in the Federation, used for the most part only to replace lost limbs, or other defects.

On the genetics side, there were laws, which didn't make much sense to her, many studies had shown many mistakes with the Eugenics Wars were on the nurture side of the debate, though some mistakes had been made on the nature side, made out of the fact that in that time period, genetics hadn't been completely mapped out. One needed only look at Dr Bashir in awareness to see examples of Genetic Engineering gone right. Not that 24th century geneticists didn't make mistakes, but usually those were out of hubris, not lack of knowledge.

On the cybernetics side, the laws were not so strict, but many doctors used the veil of the hippocratic oath to disguise their own general disgust with the concepts. Most people who would identify as pro-transhumanism were not doctors. The sole example of a starfleet doctor she did know about, it would have been understandable for him to be very much negative towards the concept, given his experiences on the Constitution-class USS Enterprise a century ago with Khan Noonien Singh. Instead, Admiral Leonard McCoy, Retired, had replaced many of his bones with artificial replacements, and only a handful of those were even out of necessity. He was also a pioneer of many techniques that, after two decades of research with like-minded engineers, produced the VISOR technology used by dozens of people throughout starfleet that were either born blind, or rendered such at a young age. That same technology wouldn't work for adults, since part of it relied on the patients being young, with their partially-formed brains that would adapt much easier.

The Borg, and Wolf 359 had only brought out the distaste towards cybernetics to the surface, and in the last two years, she'd had to fend off that discrimination.

She still hadn't had it as bad as Seven... or Captain Picard.

She still remembered that look of shock the first time they'd met. It was after Wolf 359, and he was on Earth to recover from the effects of assimilation. He'd identified her implant as borg, only he didn't react as a Starfleet Captain, but as a traumatised man who had been forced into killing the eleven thousand people from those ships, many of them families.

She asked him to keep it secret, but that yes, it was in fact 'borg-derived implants, all of them'.

A few weeks later, she'd told him her story, because, well, she needed to talk to someone.

Before Wolf 359, she'd not even been at the Academy. But after, he'd helped her finalise her cover story, and a few months later she'd travelled aboard the Enterprise on the way from Ktaria to Earth to 'begin her third year at Starfleet Academy'. That he'd called in a favour, which she did not expect, and so the people around her thought it was her third year too, out of 'experience', since they suddenly remembered seeing her around a couple of years ago. Q had given his blessings to her meddling, and assured her that in the beginning, she need not worry about 'certain things', whatever that meant. She was almost too scared to ask what that meant. Nor why Picard would, well, use a favour Q owed him, for her.

The last time they'd spoken, was two months ago. He'd asked her to say hello to Captain Janeway for him. She'd called him to ask why he'd recommended her for the Chief of Operations position, and pointed out Harry Kim almost missed out on the position because of that. It took two hours before they'd fixed the oopsie, and so she was now the Relief Operations Officer, with Harry as the Chief.

He understood why it was that way around - even though she had had a commission for a year longer, if Harry was offered the relief position, he'd take his other offer at the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, as having better career prospects. She was glad that she'd met him at the Academy already. She'd actually mentored him during his sophomore year, and then they were on par during his junior year - her senior year. That's just how intelligent he was, and she had a one-up on him in the form of being older and from another time and, oh yeah, she used to be a member of a collective.

This meant that if anyone asked, she could quite rightly point to that time as why she'd be fine with him as her immediate superior - even though she graduated a year before him, and had a year of experience that he didn't. Even though she'd spent five months of that at Utopia Planitia assigned to the construction yards, and lucky her, got to work on Voyager. She hadn't seen the Captain at the tail end of her time there, but she had the fortune of meeting Seven.

She had spotted the sleek tricorder, winked, took three paces to give Seven time to scan for the time-bomb, then lost control and dove in to hug the shocked drone, smiled and simply said, "Missed you seven." Seven was shocked, of course, and she couldn't help the whisper, "See you in, what... three years or so? This will be a long three years."

Then hugged her, let go, and legged it.

She hoped that the 29th Century Starfleet officers Seven was working with was the same lot who helped her map things out, though she doubted it.

Or not.

She washed her face, and dried it off. The water didn't bother her implant, nor the artificial eye. Her tears had dried up, and she hoped they stayed that way for a while yet.

She wasn't even on _Voyager_ yet, and here she was, already coming apart at the seems.

Probably because she _had_ had that encounter, opening the old wound, so to speak, and now she was so close...

* * *

 **USS Voyager, NCC-74656, Intrepid Class  
Currently docked with Deep Space 9**

Her pattern reformed on the transporter pad in Transporter Room Two. Before her, wasn't the first officer, as she'd expected, nor a transporter chief, but Captain Janeway, and at the controls, Harry.

"Captain."

"Ensign." The woman greeted with a small smile, "Cutting it close, aren't you? We're due to depart in ten minutes."

"I know, Ma'am. And I definitely would have missed you, if on the Endeavour I'd had to carry my stuff onto the runabout... and... same on this end." She smiled at Harry, then looked a little guilty. "Uh, if you could, forward an apology for me, to the Station?"

"Why?"

"I _really wanted to get here._ " She simply spoke, and at their looks, simply overacted the 'innocent whistle', and sarcastically added, "It was like that when I got it, I swear, boss!"

As the three made their way to the Bridge, the Captain just asked with a look. "I may have, recalibrated the warp drive..."

"Of course you did, Commander Sisko and I were wondering how you managed to get the speed up to warp 5.3... Though I'm surprised you dropped out of warp long enough to do it. You'd still have been on time, according to the Endeavour."

Annika looked guilty, but confused, "Uh, that's... I hit a bit of, uh, 'Subspace Turbulance', you could say, about 36 hours ago. It didn't knock me out of warp, but it meant that even though the computer said I was still at Warp 5, realspace equivalant put it at Warp 2. And I didn't drop out of warp... I uh... made the modifications on the fly."

Harry raised his eyebrows and looked like he was going to shout at her, but she jumped in, before either of them could. "Like from that Assymetric Warp Field Theory you wrote back at the Academy, trying to work out what went on when the Enterprise-D had that fake warp theorist aboard during it's first year, and ended up in another galaxy, or something like that. They made changes to the ships engines without dropping out of warp too. I didn't even have to pull out any isolinear chips to do it. I uh... thing is, the engine might probably most likely will need to be repaired. A Little."

Captain Janeway just chuckled as they arrived on the bridge, and Harry took his station, and she was directed to the side mission ops station on the starboard side, next to the door to Captain Janeway's ready room. Quickly she reconfigured it to act as a combined Operations/Engineering station.

Behind her, she heard the turbolift doors open and as she took her seat, she saw that Tom Paris had joined them, beside the ships' pilot, Lieutenant Stadi.

She started working, doing her part of the ships' preparations for launch.

"Commander?" Captain Janeway spoke to her first officer.

Commander Cavit shot Tom a quick look to stay out of the way, and started to issue orders.

She couldn't help smiling when the Captain shot her a look upon hearing Harry's comment of, "All Crew are aboard, Airlocks are sealed."

The viewscreen changed from showing a starfield, to show the stations' first officer, Major Kira, and they co-ordinated the changeover from station power to ship's power.

And then, given she was watching for it out of habit from the last few days, she saw that as the chronometre approached 19:00:00, the ship was finally ready to 'cast off' and depart.

"Release Docking Clamps." the Captain Spoke up, as Stadi powered the engines ready to go. "RCS thrust, take us away from the pylon and once cleared, Thrusters all ahead full." The screen changed back to the view forward, with one of the stations' upper pylons visible.

"We are away, exiting Deep Space 9's local field grid." Lt Stadi reported.

"Departure Vector Alpha Six, One quarter impulse."

Annika swallowed as her mouth suddenly ran dry, and it hit her.

She was onboard _Voyager_ , a member of the crew, about to head for the Badlands and...

 _'Please don't screw this up!'_ was all she could think, even as thankfully she worked on autopilot, her inner thoughts making no reflection on her face.

* * *

 **Mess Hall**

Harry pulled her over to a table at the mess hall - so weird seeing it with a wall of replicators instead of a galley - and the two sat at a table... for four.

"So what have you been up to? I know, I know, Starfleet Corps of Engineers,You can't talk about it." He smiled at her, cheekily, "But it's me." He lost his cheek, and his smiel faded some. "Nine months and just a few quick messages, and two video calls!"

"Am I Interrupting?"

Annika looked up to see Tom Paris, and she realised that, damn, Harry had waved him over without her noticing when they entered. She knew he was there, of course, she'd heard him argue with the replicator over some tomato soup.

She had only remembered while finishing her first shift on the bridge, all the talk about what he'd been like the first two years or so in the Delta Quadrant.

"Uh, of, of course not, Mr Paris." She spoke, trying to be formal (and failing). She waved him to the seat opposite Harry, glad that they'd sat next to each other. She didn't want tom to, well... that.

"Mr Paris? Not you too. Just Tom." She smiled slightly, and nodded.

"So, Hi, Just Tom. I'm Ensign Annika Janeway." She held out a hand. At his startled look, she commented, "No relation." Under her breath, she then added, " _unfortunately_."

"A Fan huh?" Tom asked curiously.

Harry chuckled, though, "So That's what that's about, damn, Annika."

She blinked, then sighed knowing they'd _both_ heard her.

"Ensigns."

She blinked as the First Officer and Chief Medical Officer greeted her and Harry, while clearly blanking Tom, and almost groaned aloud, realising she'd forgotten to pretend to either not know who he was, or at least, viewing him in a bad light. Oh well, she can just claim ignorance about the, new, stuff. She had met Admiral Paris during his time teaching at the Academy, and could claim to know of him only in that way, recognise him from a photo and not know the history.

Then the First Officer started, "You better not be giving her a hard time over her admiration for the Captain, Mr Paris..."

She shrunk in on herself, and whispered to Harry, "Drop the antagonism and _he'd_ sound like he's teasing me about it."

She had missed Tom's response, though from the look on the First Officers face when she did look up, she realised she'd probably missed something _epic_.

"Well... Yes. Of course."

The two officers left, and she sighed, and looked up at Tom. "What was that about? I mean... they looked ready to strangle you there... even though that would be career suicide, what with your dad."

Tom paused, and she was glad his expression said everything: he was coming to the conclusion she'd wanted... then he, shortly, explained in not-so-many-words that he'd left starfleet under a bad cloud, joined the maquis and gotten in trouble for it, sent to prison, and he was here to help them in exchange for a shorter sentence.

When he was done, she raised an eyebrow, and, translated, "So. Screwed up, washed out, they wanted your piloting skills. Something happened while with them, ended up captured, but they didn't, which... I guess means you let yourself be captured to give them time to get away? Probably, it's happened before. But you thought, maybe they might try to rescue you, like _every other time_ that someone they think as important gets captured. And to them, _everyone is_. So to _you_ , your view is that you weren't really sacrificing yourself for them, but they needed time to regroup, and when they didn't come to rescue you, now your bitter and want back at them? And, well, _you do like the Captain_. One of the few protegee's of your dads that you do like... maybe because she's not a 'brown noser'. Tell me if I'm right."

Tom blinked blankly, as he processed her stream of words. And muttered, "On target."

Harry looked uncomfortable at that.

Annika thought it over, and couldn't help admit that her own experiences were making her ability to pretend, pretty much zilch in this case. So she shrugged. "Eh, You don't know how they see it. Hell, unless they know that you getting captured was the plan, they might think you betrayed _them_. Can only ask when we do catch up... though of course, that you're helping _us, now,_ they'll feel that way anyway... so bad job all round?"

Tom shrugged, and in a clear attempt to change topic, asked, "So, what did you do before Voyager? I know this is the ships' first mission."

"Spent two months of the Endeavour, Nebula class. Temp, while waiting for this ship though. Before that, Six months at Utopia Planetia." She smiled a little, and leant forward as if to tell a secret, "Don't tell anyone, but those six months was on _this_ ship, building her."

Tom smirked a little, "Secret's safe with me." Then looked at Harry, "I think you forgot to tell your boyfriend that though."

They both frowned, confused, then it cleared, "Oh No, he's not-"

"We're not- It's..."

"He's like my Older-"

"She's more like my Older-"

"Brother"/"Sister."

Tom blinked, then started to chuckle.

Annika blinked as Harry's words settled, only for him to make the first word, "Older Brother? You're a year older than me."

"Uh, no. I just started the academy a year early. I thought I mentioned that."

Tom couldn't stop chuckling to himself.

* * *

 **Delta Quadrant**

She woke up, groggy and not knowing where or when she was for a moment, before it all snapped back into place.

The bridge was heavily damaged, consoles having exploded into bits and were on fire. She turned to her own engineering station and blinked at the flickering displays, then around at the others, and saw...

"Captain!" She shot up, and almost lost her non-existent lunch. The fact she felt the dry heaves as that reminded her she hadn't even had a bite to eat in days, though just because she could forgo eating altogether didn't mean she should. Her nausea settled, and she bent down onto her knees and looked the woman over, and almost sighed in relief that she was just unconscious, not dead.

She blinked, and her eye implant's scanners went to work. _Bruising, burns, but nothing major_. She thought, and turned her eye to the first officer.

She had to swallow a little bile, as he was dead, and his injuries were as bad as the worst she'd ever seen. He looked like he'd taken the brunt of an EPS junction' exploding in his face. Which it probably was.

She turned, to the helm, and sure enough someone else was in a bad way, though thankfully not dead, Lieutenant Stadi. Near her, stunned but not unconscious, Tom Paris, struggling to get his bearings.

At Ops, Harry was getting up with a groan, and not noticing anything past his own console as he struggled to breathe.

And everyone else on the bridge was dead, including Tactical.

"Tom, Helm, NOW, All stop!" She coughed out, and spoke to the man who was both uncle and brother. "Harry, find out what just happened." She managed to get up to Tactical, and performed scans she knew would be clear, while having attempted to contact sickbay, for naught. Then she went back to the mission ops station, and managed to get it running for an engineering diagnostic got a damage report.

"Status?!" Someone coughed out, and she looked up in relief to see the Captain was awake, though most doubtedly in pain.

She started straight away, "Warp Drive is offline, whatever happened to us completely shutdown the core dead. Impulse too. Fusion Reactors are stable, but we won't be getting shields for a few hours yet. The power couplings and energizers for the Phaser Arrays are almost all depolarised, and we've had the EPS power grid blow out all over the ship."

"Any good news?"

She appreciated the attempt at levity, as flat as it was. "Well, Life support, and Fire Suppression are at a hundred percent, otherwise we'd all be dead from plasma clouds expanding and then detonating from all these sparks..."

She didn't know whether that was sarcasm or just a report, as it was true. Both, then.

Harry spoke up, "Uh, Captain... I've managed to find out what happened... well, sort of. We, uh... we've been moved."

"Moved?"

"We're in a different location than we were... uh... from what I can tell, it looks like we've been moved over 70,000 light years..."

Annika stared out from her quarters. Most of the senior crew had been killed. First Officer, Chief of Security/Tactical, Two Security Chiefs, for the other two duty shifts, Chief Engineer and his second and third, and the entire Medical staff, as well as the Chief Science Officer, and three other department heads within Science. And a lot of Lieutenants, Ensigns and Crewmen.

195\. That's how many were aboard Voyager when they launched. When they'd woken in the Delta Quadrant, that was down to 112. 82 crewmembers, dead. It wasn't an exaggeration to say that they had lost a third of the crew, not much of one to say almost half of the crew, on its first mission. No, before its first mission. They'd only been in the Badlands for an hour when it happened.

Then they'd realised that where they had woken, once the ship was brought to a halt, they were less than a light-second away from a station... and in station-keeping next to it, was a familiar ship - the maquis raider they were after. The Val Jean, Chakotay's ship.

It was small, built to be sturdy, built to take punishment. They'd clearly rode the soliton wave that had been used to pull both ships, seperately, all the way here and arrived in a much improved condition by comparison. As small as it was, she was sure a crew of 70 was pushing it, by far. And they'd lost only a handful.

Chakotay had detected the damage, and concerned over what could do that to a ship, he'd agreed to meet.

That was where she witnessed Tuvok admit to being a Starfleet Spy (' _so that's why he didn't have provisional rank pips, yet had started out on the maquis ship'_ she had thought.) Where Chakotay had called tom a coward and traitor for 'getting caught by starfleet and now helping them'. Tom, probably wouldn't have said anything, but she had brought that subject up in the mess hall that morning, so he'd angrily replied that he'd hoped they would start to plan to rescue him the minute they knew he was captured, which happened because he'd _tried to give them time to regroup, he was helping them_ , and a year in prison, in a place that for an outside force would be ridiculously easy to jailbreak someone from...

Still, tempers simmered down, and both groups formed a boarding party.

Then everyone was knocked out, experimented on, and after, Four of the starfleet crew (including herself!) and three Maquis were taken to the planet Ocampa.

She didn't know any of them except for Harry, B'elanna, and Chell... and she was somewhat glad (and feeling guilty for it) when only they survived long enough to get away.

She honestly didn't listen afterward, when the captain tried to explain things. It wasn't like she didn't know anyway. It had been hard enough maintaining shields against all the telepaths without revealing those shields, having to choose what thoughts would be 'out there' for the ocampa to listen to. And even though, they picked up her mental discipline, so she had to explain it away somehow, and she wasn't sure her excuse that it was because her parents were from different species was believed.

The Ocampan had probably never heard of the Borg before.

It had been _exhausting_ , though.

Once she was recovered, she found out from Harry, who had only small lesions and so had been healed quickly by the EMH, that the Captain had rather destroyed the Caretaker Array than let it fall into the hands of the Kazon once the Caretaker was dead.

She had expected the announcement after that that the two crews were merging into one, and that Chakotay had flown the Val Jean into one of the big Kazon ships.

And, while the end result was the same, it came differently in a shocking way. The Val Jean had survived the battle, and they would try to take both ships home, together, yet would work together.

Tom had been the one who explained the logistics.

Both crews would become one. for ease, Starfleet. This would bring the ships compliment back up - 110 starfleet, and 55 Maquis had survived. the Intrepid class was designed with a nominal crew of 160 and capacity for 200 should extra personnel be a mission requirement. A Skeleton Crew of 4 could run the Val Jean, but ideally required twenty.

She'd had to ask, though, how they'd stuffed 70 people aboard, and Tom shrugged and just told her to ask Chakotay, or B'Elanna, or Chell, or any of the other Maquis crew.

They'd travelled for a few days at Warp 6 - the raider barely making it, before they had dropped out in an isolated system.

By the time she was on her feet, they'd already been there a week making repairs to both ships. Time for her to take in all the differences, and how much was, as far as she could tell, the same. The Ship had the same number of crew by this point, she knew. But the Val Jean hadn't been destroyed, ramming a Kazon ship.

Voyager had had a larger crew compliment, as had Val Jean, and more people on both sides had died, but still managed to make the same number of survivors.

None of the people she had recognised were dead, and there had only been a handful of unfamiliar faces. People, she thought, that hopefully wouldn't die as they had originally, if they had been aboard originally.

She didn't know the cause of those changes, but there were changes that she knew she had caused. Changes that had been intentional.

Some had stretched as far back as her first days working on the ship at Utopia Planetia, suck as sneaking in an Industrial Replicator to Cargo Bay One, various equipment for mining in Three, and altering the material capacities for deuterium and antimatter... and weapons loadout too.

The end result of others along the way is that the ship is a little, cramped. Less floor space to quarters - so fewer. Crew Quarters vary from three to eight per room, while officers' are a little... smaller, than they would have been. Senior officers get the few bigger rooms, but no dedicated office. Chakotay would have to do with what would have been an open lounge space to be his office, with a divider and door to his bedroom, instead of it being just one big room. Only the Captain's room hadn't been reduced in size, though she had taken the concept and made an office for herself anyway. Annika only knew about that when during her last week on the assignment she'd been fitting some modifications in the room, and saw the changes for herself.

Others were like the phasers - once they'd been repaired enough for the fight, each shot could go longer, deal more damage, recharge quicker, less likely to miss, and so on.

Sensors were a touch more accurate - Not the 30 percent boost that Seven of Nine would have managed over the ships' standard specification, but a five percent boost was still more than respectable. And the Shields too had improved redundancy.

The Hull was stronger, and sections over vital areas - that didn't have windows in the standard design, thankfully, were up-armored, though that one she succeeded in sneaking past the construction crew completely, because the armor was a tetraburnium alloy, with some highly-classified material mixed in that while at such low density did not stopping sensors from penetrating the hull, the refractive matrix meant that it did hide the fact that the ship had tetraburnium based armor plating in various locations. Such as the Bridge module - the entire outer surface coated with a layer between the fifth and sixth duranium layer.

The ship was still quite clearly Voyager, though. Just absent some parts for a while, and with extra bits early... which is pretty much what her changes were about - bringing them _early_.

As she gazed out at the morning sky of the unnamed planet, she was glad that the Captain had made her one of the Department heads. Her immediate superior was still Harry, and from him to the First Officer and then the Captain. She'd come up with an idea to build an 'advanced stellar cartography suite', basically what Seven would build. And Conveniently, it'll help but not too much.

She dare not call him, but she hoped that her omnipotent friend had included this with it... that Seven, and not a different drone, ended up on the ship. Or with. But if there was just to be one drone disconnected after, well... it better be _her_.

She got changed into her uniform, and couldn't help gazing into the mirror in the bathroom. So little had changed since the last time she saw her reflection, yet so much had.

She looked the same, yet different.

Then she knew what it was that had changed.

She was on Voyager in the Delta Quadrant.

She was home.


End file.
